Ram Charan What Every Company Should Know

Profitable growth is the No. 1 business imperative today. But the need for companies to grow, and all the media and leadership attention it attracts, shouldn't obscure an equally important need -- your own personal need to grow.

In fact, for knowledge workers and leaders there's no more important question than "Is my personal growth in tune with the changing external landscape?" Are you learning new skills, building on your knowledge base, gaining new experiences, and carefully scrutinizing the ways you've traditionally viewed and approached your work?

If not, now's the time to make personal growth a top priority.

Why Personal Growth Matters

We're all familiar with the flow of jobs to call centers in India and factories in China. It's a global world for highly skilled knowledge workers as well. The Internet has made it possible for companies to tap the talent they need virtually anywhere around the globe.

Companies are willing to pursue that talent and shift their focus quickly. The bottom line for knowledge workers and leaders today is that competition is fierce, and everyone has to be at the top of their game.

Also driving the need for personal growth is the speed and abruptness of change. There's seemingly a full-time constituency of scientists, engineers, advertisers, Silicon Valley investors, and others whose livelihoods are based on their ability to drive and create change. And change of any kind means new requirements for businesses and their employees.

In the face of these realities, today's knowledge workers and business leaders find themselves at increased risk of obsolescence. Skills and knowledge bases that were cutting-edge yesterday can be routine, or even out of date, tomorrow.

But it's not just job-related skills that put you at risk. Holding on to the ways you've worked or thought in the past, or to outdated assumptions, makes you vulnerable to obsolescence when the environment around you changes swiftly and abruptly.

Adapt or Perish

For instance, consider the leaders grappling with the troubled newspaper industry. As readers have abandoned newspapers for electronic news outlets, and classified advertisers have turned to online job boards and auction web sites such as eBay, those who continue to operate using the traditional newspaper business model put themselves and their employees at risk.

On the other hand, take a leader like Thomson Corporation (TOC) CEO Richard Harrington. In the 1990s, he divested the company of its 55 daily newspapers even though they were profitable, and was able to steer his company away from the coming industry downturn and recast it as a publishing business delivering information services online to several professional markets.

By embracing a new vision, Harrington anticipated and reacted to change and avoided obsolescence. Like him, you should view yourself as being in a constant state of reinvention in order to keep up with the relentless pace of change and successfully adapt to it.

Here are some steps you can take to avoid obsolescence:

• Refresh your knowledge and skills.
  
  This is an unprecedented era of knowledge creation, and as we all know, technology changes quickly. You have to keep up to date with technology and continually build your leadership skills. What are you doing to keep current? Have you made the commitment to be a lifelong learner.
  
  
• Reinvent your thought and decision-making processes.
  
  As the world changes, your thinking about your business must also change. AOL once boasted millions of subscribers who paid a monthly fee for Internet access and content. Now AOL's leaders are thinking about their business very differently, and are offering many of its services for free.
  

  Whether or not this new thinking came soon enough for AOL to stay viable remains to be seen, but it's worth considering where the company would find itself today if its leaders had embraced this new thinking years earlier.
  

• Reevaluate your assumptions and personal beliefs.
  
  Everyone makes unconscious assumptions about people, their business, and the external world. Are yours leaving you out of step with current realities? A belief that all the good ideas come from inside your company, for instance, can make you obsolete in a business that needs to innovate and must seek ideas from anywhere.
  

  Consider the now-retired oil company executive who opted not to acquire an oil exploration and drilling business because he and his company's managers assumed oil prices would decline -- as they always had after a sharp rise. A leader at a competing oil company made a completely different assumption: that high oil prices were here to stay. He made the acquisition, which proved to be a very good buy.

Three Steps to Personal Growth

You're busy, of course, but it's up to you to balance the current demands of your job with your own personal growth imperative. These best practices can help:

1. Assume the responsibility yourself.
   
   Your organization may offer development opportunities such as training courses, executive programs, or even new job assignments, perhaps designed around a specific career path or set of skills. By all means take advantage of learning opportunities, but don't put your fate in someone else's hands.
   

   Decide for yourself the ways you want to grow and seek your own opportunities. For instance, if you aspire to high levels of leadership, you should be sure you're getting exposure to different parts of the business. To do so, you could let your bosses know you're open to lateral moves, not just promotions.
   

   It's also up to you to carve out the time to grow. If you're not devoting a minimum of 10 percent of your time to it, free some up by delegating more or finding capable people to relieve some of your burden.
   

   Whatever you need to do to make the time, do it. No excuses. In my study of leaders who became CEOs of large companies, I found that these individuals made growth a habit. One such leader is Jeffrey Immelt, who as CEO of GE spends some 20 percent of his time engaged in activities to re-conceptualize the business and thereby keeps updating and expanding his understanding of the business context.
   

2. Make your own luck.
   
   Assuming responsibility for your growth is not just about time, but also about finding and seizing opportunities when they arise.
   

   One individual I know provides an excellent example. Starting out as a corporate attorney, he used every job he had as an opportunity to expand not just his job-related skills but also his leadership ability. Fueled by his focus on personal growth, he advanced in his organization and was promoted to higher levels with more responsibility, building a strong track record of success and broadening his understanding of business along the way.
   

   Eventually, he became interested in running a business, and when he realized his opportunities were limited at his existing company he moved to another organization. He continued to grow, and a few years later took a job as vice president and general counsel at a large company in another industry. He kept growing, and today he's that company's CEO.
   

   Is this person lucky to be the CEO of a large company? Or did he create his own destiny? My take is that luck had little to do with his success.
   

3. Go elsewhere if you have to.
   
   Most knowledge workers and leaders can grow in their current jobs, even if their formal responsibilities don't change. But if those opportunities are too limited, or if your work environment isn't supportive of your personal growth, explore other alternatives.
   

   Changing jobs, companies, or industries is, for most people, a last resort, but it's sometimes necessary so you shouldn't be afraid of it. It seems far less risky when you know you're expanding your abilities and increasing your value as a result.

The Many Rewards of Growth

Growth is about staying relevant by keeping up-to-speed with the changing world around you. But it also provides something that can be even more valuable: A sense of control over your own career and your own future.

There can be career advancement and financial rewards to personal growth, but don't underestimate the "psychic" rewards. Downsizings, outsourcing, and relentless globalization are mainstay realities of today's working world, but as you assume control of your personal growth you gain the confidence of knowing that your future rests soundly in your own hands.